Jajah’s 2006 Christmas – Reputation – Lost Opportunities

I am highly critical of Jajah in this post because I still sort of love Jajah and I still think Jajah’s future can be promising. I definitely think Jajah could have done much better than the bad (some would say horrible) experiences that people had with Jajah on Christmas day. In my humble opinion, I think Jajah might (?) have been better off if the 2006 Christmas day promotional campaign was not launched in a widely publicized manner. I honestly think it back fired rather badly. To balance this piece, I will share a few suggestions of mine at the end of this critical post.

The Jajah 2006 Christmas Story

I think Jajah’s reputation has been damaged (greatly?) yesterday by the many people who tried but failed to use Jajah to make a call. Sure, many may have managed to call successfully but I am willing to guess that many many more failed. I personally tried and failed to call for a period of over three hours in the morning and friends told me they had problems in the evening as well. I finally made a call around 12:33 pm MST (when the calls traffic finally slowed down a bit, I suppose). If I weren’t testing and preparing to write this review, I would have given up long time before that.

Sample Jajah Christmas experience of one,

1. The steps to make a call were followed but no connection was made by Jajah. And no error message was returned.
2. Later on, my phone would rung but all I heard was “Good bye” and then Jajah hung me up.
3. And then I saw the following two notices at different times when I clicked “Call“.

I am disappointed with Jajah for the following reasons,

1. Planning or the lack of — People make a lot of calls on Christmas day and this should not be news to anyone (especially when the calls have been promoted as free). I wonder how much extra capacity did Jajah add for Christmas day? What was Jajah’s plan if they had many more calls than they could handled? I suspect they didn’t plan for the “unthinkable” as we experienced. But should what happened be really that unimaginable?
2. Lack of apologies to the user — It should be noted that “Call cannot be connected, as too many users are using the system. Please try again later.” is a technical system message but not an apology. The real message should have been a note of apology. People wanted to make calls on Christmas day and the least the Jajah team could have done was to apologize for all the technical troubles.
3. Lost marketing opportunity — I want companies like Jajah, myBlueZebra (which I had no problem making calls on Christmas day. To be fair, myBlueZebra is not free!), etc. to do well. But yesterday was a jarring Jajah disappointment. Yesterday could have been a great day to bring in new Jajah users but it turned out to be a day that showed the weakness of the Jajah system. I believe a reliable telecomm system is the price of entry into this market place. I seriously thought and asked myself, was Jajah trying to get us to test their system on Christmas day?

After this long and critical entry, here are just my 2 cents on what the management team at Jajah should seriously considered doing,

1. Apologizes — The Jajah team should apologize to Jajah users on Jajah’s website and in its blog.
2. Make users happy — If the team is up to it and is 128% sure that they fix all problems, they can launch a “Free New Year 2007” program. But, if they are not 128% sure, or if they don’t have a fool-proof and fail-safe backup plan (in case their own system failed), then I say forget about the” Free New Year 2007” idea. It will be too risky.
3. Explains — It may seem unnecessary but I think it is very important to explain to Jajah users (many are geeks) what caused the various problems on Christmas and what is Jajah doing to fix them in the future.
4. Take advantage of these problems — Use this opportunity to be open about system wide problems (e.g. really noisy calls, clicked “call” and then phone rings 30+ seconds later, etc.). Assure the users that Jajah team is aware of these problems and explain to users how these problems are being handled or fixed by the technical team.

I truly hope the Jajah team can learn from this unpleasant 2006 Christmas experience.

P.S. Competition is a good thing. When Jajah was having problem on Christmas day, I had no problem making long distance calls with myBlueZebra. The calls weren’t free but the service was reliable. For more info, please see my interview with myBlueZebra’s CEO David Freyer.

P.P.S. For the record, my Stats prof must have done a great job. As I still think of the Poisson distribution (PD) whenever I think of telephone calls. Quoting Wikipedia, “the number of telephone calls to a busy switchboard in one hour follows a Poisson distribution“. But when everyone picks up the phone and call (e.g. in Christmas or New Year), then it doesn’t follow a PD.